More About:

Climate change will affect agriculture over the next 30 to 50 years and will require scientists and farmers to develop new systems to adapt to more variable weather patterns.

Jerry Hatfield, Laboratory Director and USDA-ARS Supervisory Plant Physiologist at Ames, Iowa, said more extremes in weather, including drought, heat and excessive rainfall, will increase production risk.

Hatfield discussed the challenges of climate change during the recent Texas Plant Protection Association annual conference in College Station. He said change is real but left it to others to determine if those changes come from natural cycles, human activity or a combination. The need to prepare for change, however, offers challenges for the entire agricultural industry.

He said variability in temperature and precipitation has affected agriculture since the early 1900s. In some cases, higher temperatures have increased yields. “But that also increased variability,” he said. Cotton and corn yields have increased significantly over the past century. A big part of the increase results from better cotton varieties and transgenics and improved corn hybrids.

“Corn yields stabilized in the 1960s,” Hatfield said, “but has been variable the last 20 years because of precipitation and temperature variability.”

He said temperature changes may not occur uniformly. “The assumption (with the trend showing warmer temperatures every year) is that every place is warmer,” he said. “But some areas cooled and some areas warmed. Alaska witnessed the biggest warming trend from 1901 through 2006.”

He said in the future the earth likely will see more days in which the temperature exceeds 90 degrees. “South Texas, for instance, may see even more, possibly half the year with temperatures above 90 degrees.

“We will have to develop agricultural systems to deal with higher temperatures.”